According to local lore, Annie Palmer, the wife of plantation owner John Palmer, had a dark streak beyond the black magic she practiced. In the 1800s, she murdered John, her second and third husbands, and numerous male slaves whom she’d taken as lovers. She finally met her match in a slave who also practiced magic and…
Said to be Australia’s most haunted house, this isolated residence was built on a hillside in New South Wales in 1884 by farmer Christopher Crawley. After he died in 1920, his wife, Elizabeth, became a Bible-immersed recluse, leaving the house only twice before she passed away. Her ghost is thought to walk the rooms, and…
Located on the southwestern coast of Italy and settled in the 8th century BC, Cumae was the first Greek colony on the Italian mainland. It is best known for being the seat of the Cumaean sibyl, or prophetess. In the Aeneid, Aeneas went to see the sibyl before he entered the underworld; a passage to hell…
This castle was first built in the 14th century, and it’s where the Queen Mother—the late mother to Queen Elizabeth II—grew up. It’s also said to be populated by a bevy of ghosts including the Grey Lady, or the Lady of Glamis, otherwise known as Lady Janet Douglas. Accused of murdering her husband by poisoning…
Longtime UK journalist was a walking exemplar of human gullibility. He is the most unreliable of unreliable narrators. There is no seed of possibility from which he cannot grow kudzu-like growths of ergo propter hoc. His first books were straightforward; Mysteries of the Great War is an excellent anecdotal account which includes unsettling information including information that Paths of…
In 1932, at age ten, Menger writes that he met his first alien; a beautiful blonde Space Sister in the traditional long white gown, who told him he would be meeting space people throughout his life. He said he did; that at various times they flew him to the moon, landed in his back yard…
The beautiful, sprawling Forbidden City in Beijing—made up of 980 buildings on 180 acres—is one of China’s best-known landmarks. Many true ghost stories have also come from within its walls. From the 15th century through the early 20th century, the Chinese emperor lived there, but now it’s rumored to be haunted by the ghosts of…
This remote village is home to less than 800 inhabitants—and one spooky vampire story. In 1725, a resident named Petar Plogojowitz passed away, and in the next eight days, nine deaths occurred. The nine who died had said on their deathbeds that they had been throttled—by Plogojowitz’s corpse. Priests and officials flocked to Kisiljevo to investigate,…
According to local legend, Julia Brown, a practicing voodoo priestess, used to sit on her front porch near the Machac Swamp and sing, “One day I’m gonna die, and I’m gonna take all of you with me,” reports MentalFloss.com. That curse turned out to be true: On the day of Brown’s funeral in 1915, a category 4 hurricane…
Devil’s Pool is a natural pool created by surrounding boulders and a waterfall that feeds it, and as beautiful as it is, people say it’s cursed. According to legend, Oolana, an Aboriginal woman, drowned herself in the pool after being separated from her true love. Still searching for him today, she lures young men to…